“I get too much work from one client”: problem?

“I get too much work from one client. Should I be worried?” This is a question I often hear from freelancers, especially those who work for agencies. Is a client that/who provides 50%, 60%, or even 80% of your income a problem?

On the one hand, someone with a full-time salaried job earns 100% of their income from one “client,” their employer. And, these days, many salaried jobs are not much more stable than a freelance client. That employee could be let go with minimal notice and minimal severance pay, and be left with no income at all. In an ideal world, we’d all have 20 clients, each providing 5% of our income so that we’re nice and diversified, but the real freelance world doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes you have a client who sends you tons of interesting work, and pays well, and is easy to work with; letting them become dominant in your client portfolio might make sense. Additionally, fewer clients generally means more billable time. You get to know the client’s processes, so you spend less time negotiating rates and turnaround times, figuring out the client’s preferred style, etc.

On the other hand, a dominant client puts you at risk. Here’s a situation that happened to me last year. I started out in about 2010, translating small projects for a direct client, and over the years the work increased into the five figures. They weren’t a dominant client, but they were a substantial client. And then one day (can you hear the ominous music playing the background?), they e-mailed me to say that in the course of hiring an employee for a half-time position, they had found a native English speaker who had also worked as a translator. They decided to hire that person full-time and include translation in the job. So, literally overnight, that client dropped from five figures to a couple of hundred dollars a year (when the in-house person is away or overloaded).

Other risks of having a dominant client include:

Being asked to lower your rates, and worrying that your income will decrease if you say yes, but you’ll lose the client if you say no.

A sudden decrease in work volume, if the dominant client is an agency and they lose the major end client you work for.

Becoming overly comfortable with that one client; not updating your marketing materials or plan, because the client feels so secure.

Losing the client entirely, if they go out of business, retire, your main contact leaves, etc.

So, what to do? Here are some suggestions, and please add your own in the comments.

If you have a dominant client, make sure it’s a deliberate decision, not a passive one. If you’re intentionally saying, “I choose to earn 80% of my income from this client for reasons X, Y, and Z,” that’s a lot different than “Holy… How much did I earn from them last year?? And now they’re going out of business?”

Build up a rainy day fund for your business. When I lost my substantial client, I actually didn’t panic. It was a bummer because I really like their work, but I knew that I could draw money out of my business savings account if I needed to (because I force myself to pay into that buffer fund for just such an occasion). The rainy day fund can save you from the dilemma I mentioned above, where you feel trapped in a bad situation with a client who won’t pay your rates.

Have a plan B. If your dominant client dropped you tomorrow, what would you do? Are your marketing materials in order? What kind of client would you want to replace them with? If you were rebuilding 80% of your work flow from scratch, what would you want to be doing?

If the dominant client is an agency, pay attention to where your work is coming from. Is it from one end client, or from multiple end clients? If it’s from one end client, you’re in a doubly risky situation, because you’re subject not only to the agency’s vicissitudes, but to their potential loss of that end client. If you work for multiple end clients, things are little safer.

In sum, I’m not totally opposed to the idea of a dominant client. But it needs to be a purposeful decision, not a passive one, and you need a) some buffer money to tide you over if you lose that client, and b) a plan for how to find new work when/if that happens.

Nice new design, Corinne, I like it very much. It’s quite modern and stylish.

Re: titular question, I like to see ‘problems’ as potential opportunities. This is not as simple, shallow and hurra-optimistic (as we say in Polish) as the awful corporate slogan about no problems but only ‘challenges’. Rather, any situation tends to be more complex than just having cons and risks. There are often some pros and opportunities that can be found or made. Like Caesar said: aut viam inveniam or faciam — find a way or make one. Like you say, one doesn’t have to be exclusively passive and receptive, one can look proactively and imaginatively, or just carve a path, even bludgeon one’s way through if necessary. If that is difficult to imagine, then one could always start from a simple SWOT on a single paper sheet from the printer, which really isn’t too much to ask of someone who is supposed to be motivated to work to succeed and in most cases is already supposed to understand business, given as most translators already include business as at least a working field and include some quantity of direct B2B work (sans agency).

So yeah, know what you’re doing, plan for contingencies etc. This means you have to commit to more thoughtful management and just simply burn more energy analysing, assessing and managing your practice (I’m reluctant to say ‘your business’), but it also means you need to make sure you charge enough to cover more than your current expenses. Which is more easily achieved if you have a thoughtfully crafted and well-arranged offer, which again ties into management/marketing time and effort, which again starts from not just being passive.

On a different note, please allow me to suggest one more advantage of having a dominant client: the sum total of B2B invoices from that client may well be more than that client would be willing or allowed to pay you as an employee. Or perhaps the numbers would be equal, but you’d also need to sit idle hours at the office instead of being three to patch the gaps with additional work from other clients, especially work that pays rush fees or offers some other additional benefits. After all, a less than spectacular (in terms of yield) but still more or less steady and reliable source of income allows you to be more choosy with your *other* clients and prospects — which is not something we would normally credit the lacklustre long-term arrangement with enabling, but the causal link is undeniable. So just max out on the opportunities you can find.

Okay, one more thing: once you’ve identified risks such as being expected to lower your rates, you can start managing them. Again, there’s no need to get either shy or confrontational, just prepare way ahead for any such conversation, so you can deliver a well-practiced line about how you can relate to the pressure your client is facing but you have your own expenses, investments etc., and the value you provide is already very accessibly priced (supposing it is), so basically just laying out (briefly! or you’ll lose the client’s attention and sound whiny) and supporting (briefly! or you’ll sound apologetic and insecure) your value proposal. Which, of course, you need to already be aware of, which again goes back to management and marketing time and effort.

A lot of awkward situations with potentially disastrous results can be prevented by just a little prior thought. The military say PPPP(P)P: proper planning prevents piss-poor peformance.

Thank you for this thoughtful and well written article. I do indeed get the bulk of my work from one client, but this client is the one that costs me the least amount of unbilled admin work – they use a straightforward translation software and all the filing and invoicing is done for you automatically. They are an agency with several branches and many different end clients and I work with several contacts within that one client. I am aware of the potential risks but happy with my decision as my unbilled working time is minimal.

I have been a translator for over 30 years and have managed to have a nice portfolio o direct clients and a few agencies. However, the translation business is changing very rapidly and in the last couple of years I have lost a couple of long-time direct clients for two reasons: 1) my main contact was fired and her replacement became enchanted by the technologically-superior offer of a big translation agency, and they dropped me after 20+ years of service; 2) another direct client requested a quote for a set of manuals. My quote was about $5,500 in 2 weeks; they got an offer of $1800 in one week. Here we have the MT factor, companies that pay peanuts for editing MT outcomes. Some CAT software even come with access to MT memories, such as WordFastPro which provides access to Google Translate and Microsoft Translate. Right now I have only one big client which provides 80% of my income. They are so really big that going out of business is not an outlook. However, I worry and try to keep at least 3 months living expenses in my savings account in case of termination. At the same time, I’m acquiring new direct clients and hope to rebuild a better portfolio based on experience, quality and specialty.

Thanks for the article, Corinne. You’are right – too much work from one client may put your freelance business at risk. I work in a team with three translators and charge a small commission for project management. In cases when I start receiving too much work from one client, I try to distribute such workload between my team and focus on finding new clients, marketing and administrative tasks instead of relying on a single client.

Thanks, Simon! That’s a really interesting way to manage a large client. And, I think that if there’s one niche in our industry that’s crying out to be filled, it’s the boutique agency/translation team niche. So that sounds like a great idea all around.

Very good points, Corinne! I would add that another risk of relying on one dominant client is that you’re also at risk of being affected by geopolitical conditions. My largest client was an agency in the UK prior to the Brexit vote, and aside from the drop in the exchange rate, I also noticed a reduced volume of work being sent my way. As a result, I decided to diversify my client base to clients outside the UK. Now I get paid in a variety of currencies, mitigating the risk of any one country’s economy or currency taking a nose-dive.

Really good point, thanks Jonathan! I think the same is true of the current US political situation: reduced funding to certain programs could have a ripple effect on translators. It sounds like you came up with a good solution that covers currency fluctuations as well.

My secret recipie is being grumpy, expensive and slow so that the clients I have are the ones who really want me 😉 well, not quite. But being very careful about the work and not yielding on price are good. Then maybe the client who is dominant to a worrying level will start filtering what they send you, i.e. the stuff where they’re sure about why they are using you and not someone else. And then you have the capacity to take on more from others and keep a bit of balance. Over the years I’ve never had a major client who didn’t come back from time to time.

Thanks for your comment; OK, I literally laughed out loud at your first sentence. But yes, you make some excellent points. Paring the dominant client down is perhaps the best way to go, and that’s interesting that your dominant clients do come back for occasional projects.

Most of my clients do a lot of their everyday communication in English anyway. For them it only makes strategic sense to outsource a subset of their communication to me. The more intelligently they choose that material the better it is for them and the better it is for me. The lazier they are about just shovelling stuff over my way, the bigger the risk that one day they’ll wake up and think hey, why are we spending all this money on that guy? And then poof, they’re gone (for a while, till they realize some of it was worthwhile). But if they are more selective, they get more value, they perceive that they’re getting more value, I can work for better rates and I also don’t get clogged up with projects that are so big I have to fend off other clients for weeks on end.

I’ve often felt I wanted to tell them explicitly how to choose what stuff to get help with and even prepared a talk on this subject, but I don’t think people want to be lectured. Anyway the real core of it is about the different techniques for creating cohesion and coherence in English compared to German texts, and that is linguistic stuff that is way over their heads, even if they can sense that text a is working and text b isn’t. Better to just let them develop that more or less passive and inarticulate feeling for what works; it really boils down to a) marketing texts and b) technical things that really need someone to understand what’s going on. These are the areas where if they try cheap solutions they will get noticeable feedback that it’s not working.

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